To give you goosebumps – Helen Keller visits Martha Graham’s studio and experiences dance for the first time, likening it to thought itself.
“Oh, how wonderful! How like thought! How like the mind it is!”
To stop your breath: 72-year-old Helen Keller visits Martha Graham’s studio, experiences dance for the first time – a true triumph of the human spirit over disability.
As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood; it has burnt down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming towards her. ’I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, “Please don’t grieve.”’
She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. ’It always seems to say the same thing to me, “Please don’t grieve.” But I grieve, nevertheless.’
